mstances to yield to him.
The consequence has been, that while the American has stamped his
character upon the whole country, there are not ten places in the valley
of the Mississippi, where you would infer, from anything you see, that a
Frenchman had ever placed his foot upon the soil. The few localities in
which the French character yet lingers, are fast losing the distinction;
and a score or two of years will witness a total disappearance of the
gentle people and their primitive abodes. Even now--excepting in a few
parishes in Louisiana--the relics of the race bear a faded, antiquated
look: as if they belonged to a past century, as, indeed, they do, and
only lingered now, to witness, for a brief space, the glaring
innovations of the nineteenth, and then, lamenting the follies of modern
civilization, to take their departure for ever!
Let them depart in peace! For they were a gentle and pacific race, and
in their day did many kindly things!
"The goodness of the heart is shown in deeds
Of peacefulness and kindness."
Their best monument is an affectionate recollection of their simplicity:
their highest wish
----"To sleep in humble life,
Beneath the storm ambition blows."
FOOTNOTES:
[70] _History of the United States_, vol. iii., p. 336. Enacted in
Massachusetts.
[71] A detailed and somewhat tedious account of these savage inroads,
may be found in Warburton's _Conquest of Canada_, published by Harpers.
New-York. 1850.
[72] This is the estimate of Bancroft--and, I think, at least, thirty
thousand too liberal. If the number were doubled, however, it would not
weaken the position in the text.
[73] On the subject of naming towns, much might have been said in the
preceding article in favor of French taste, and especially that just and
unpretending taste, which led them almost alway to retain the Indian
names. While the American has pretentiously imported from the Old World
such names as Venice, Carthage, Rome, Athens, and even London and Paris,
or has transferred from the eastern states, Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and New York, the Frenchman, with a better judgment, has
retained such Indian names as Chicago, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Cahokia,
Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Wabash, and Mississippi.
[74] This word is a pregnant memento of the manner in which the vain
words of flippant orators fall, innocuous, to the ground, when they
attempt to stigmatize, with contemptuous terms, t
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